


January, 2011

by GrenadeFestival



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Gen, Nightmares, Prophetic Dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-18
Updated: 2017-10-18
Packaged: 2019-01-18 22:12:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12397278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrenadeFestival/pseuds/GrenadeFestival
Summary: Alex is used to having unpleasant dreams, but some nightmares feel too real for comfort.





	January, 2011

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this drabble for day 3 of a writing challenge I attempted for October. The prompt was this: The character is distressed from several nights of nightmares/sleep paralysis, all of which leave them waking up terrified. Eventually, what they see in their dreams start to blend into reality.
> 
> Enjoy!

Four. There were four of them now. Sarah, Seth, Amy, and now Jessica. He couldn’t be sure about Jessica - the night had been so chaotic, and so many things hadn’t gone according to plan - but whether she was dead or alive, she had to be out of the picture. That was all he could ask for at this point. Unlike the others, he thought maybe there was a chance she could have been saved. She was further from this than anyone, at least she was until Jay had the brilliant idea to drag her down with him…

Alex’s blood boiled when he thought about Jay. “Idiot” couldn’t even  _ begin  _ to describe him. Careless, clumsy, negligent, selfish, little  _ ass _ . He had to be taken care of.  _ Soon.  _ Then he could focus on Tim and the other man in the mask. Even if leaving them for last meant more danger for himself, at least they weren’t going to bring any new victims into the circle. No, Jay was a far greater risk. All he had to do now was find him. He’d lost track of him after the debacle with Jessica, but he knew Jay would turn back up eventually. All Alex had to do was keep watching the YouTube channel. 

The channel was silent the next day. And the next. And the next. Alex found there was very little to do except go to work and wait. He wondered if he should quit his job soon. He’d been saving religiously in case anything happened and he had to disappear. Maybe after he took care of Jay, that would be his next step. Make himself harder to find. It seemed like a good idea. 

Wait. Work. Plan. 

At night, he dreamed. 

He was used to his dreams being unpleasant - they had been for a while - but this dream, this  _ nightmare _ , was different from the others. 

The first night, all he could remember was blood. Tons of it. It pooled in his hands, soaked into his shirt, flowed across the floor. It was caked in every whorl in his skin, but he couldn’t tell whose it was or where it was coming from. He could taste iron in his throat, even after he woke up. 

The second night, the blood returned. Alex felt his heart pounding faster and faster as he realized it was happening again. The blood dripped from his fingers, and where it hit the floor, the wood cracked and splintered. The boards began to give way. The floor shattered beneath him, giving way to a yawning black void, and yet he didn’t fall. As he looked around the room, the destruction began to spread. The walls exploded outwards, and the windows crumbled into pieces, and all around him was darkness. Something in it seemed to call out to him, but when he woke up he couldn’t remember the words. 

The third night he saw people. He saw Amy again, as he always saw her. Smiling with her hair stirring in some summer breeze he couldn’t feel. She always tried to speak to him, but he could never understand what she was saying. Sometimes they were sitting out on his lawn at his old house or out on their porch, but that night they were neither of those places. He could see Amy standing instead across a rushing creek deep in the forest. Watching him. He waded into the water, trudging deeper and deeper until the water was up to his chest. A voice spoke to him from behind, but he couldn’t turn around fast enough to see who it was. 

_ “When you killed Amy, did you feel in control then?”  _

He woke up with those words burned into his head. He scrawled them on a piece of paper and crumpled it up immediately when he realized what he was doing. He couldn’t fall asleep again that night. 

The fourth night he saw a building he’d never seen before. Old. Disused. The halls were floored with green linoleum and powdered with dust. It looked like a school, or at least what was left of one. There was something familiar about it, but he woke up before he could place it. 

During the day he thought about it obsessively. He’d seen that building before, but where? He paced. He looked at pictures on his phone. He started driving. 

School. His new college.  _ Amy’s  _ college. That’s where the building was. The school was in the process of renovating, so the classrooms weren’t being used. He could only look inside the windows, for fear of being caught trespassing, but there was no mistaking it. Dread settled into his stomach as he left, and it refused to leave him even in the early hours of the morning. 

The fifth night he barely slept, but it was enough to dream. He was in the college again, a gun in his hands. He knew there were no more bullets in it, though he wasn’t sure how he knew this. Around him the scene shifted back and forth, turning rooms into forests and tunnels and other rooms that didn’t looked like they belonged. He was hunting someone. He knew that much. He didn’t know who. He could only assume why. 

Then he started bleeding. 

It poured out of his neck and across the linoleum. In a split second he was lying on the floor, gasping for air. He thought he heard screaming, but he couldn’t tell if it was him or someone else. Blocks of color and bursts of static swam across his vision. A figure loomed above him, moving too quickly to see clearly. The figure struck him over and over again. 

_ I’m dying. It’s going to kill me, I’m dying I’m dying I’m dying…  _

There was so much blood…

The sixth night, curled up in a pile of blankets in the backseat of his car, miles and miles away from his home, he didn’t dream at all. 


End file.
